Posted on 02/05/2025 4:54:44 AM PST by Red Badger
Once they get fusion reactors producing electricity then every home will have one!..................
Well, I know a solar farm that might be had for a low low price soon......
Right around the corner... AGAIN!
I could wish that fusion research were done in the name of understanding the physics and not hypotheses (lies might be a better term) about the outcome.
Humans are fortunate to have a giant fusion reactor, already. It is the Sun, and it is far enough away that its radiations don’t cook us. For “free” energy, it may well be the best we can get. I don’t say that fusion research is valueless, but lying about what may come of it probably is.
For my money, it is the gravitational collapse of the Sun which powers its fusion. It may also generate neutrons, or did in an earlier epoch. You probably can’t fake this, or can do so only like a refrigerator operates, on a small scale and against net reversal.
As soon as my perpetual motion stocks kick in I will.
I think you're not understanding the physics. The fusion reactions (D+D and D+T) they're talking about aren't "fed" by neutrons, they produce neutrons -- very energetic ones, in fact. The OP is saying that the neutron production they're seeing is "isotropic" (no directionality), meaning that they have a very homogenous fusion process going on.
The fusion reactions are "fed" by high temperature and pressure. Getting the temperature and pressure high enough, while still getting excess energy out of the fusion reaction, and making the whole thing economically feasible, is the trick. It's not clear that it's even possible.
It's a bit costly. And it requires a lot of tedious research about the climate in your area, your own energy consumption habits, etc. to make sure it's ideal for you (in my case the monthly payment I make on the loan I took out to pay for all of these improvements is less than the cost of the energy I'm not having to buy). But it's a very sweet situation to pull only 20% of the power we need from the grid, including how much power we use to charge the EV for the local driving (last year it was 16K miles just on the home charged miles).
That's mainly because no blankety-blank bureaucrat has figured out a regulation to control how much sunlight hits my property. That's really the only thing that solar has over hydrocarbons (I can't drill my own natural gas or oil, etc.) And so far, Bond villain Bill Gates hasn't figured out a way to block the sun yet.
Thanks for clarifying.
The fusion in the sun's core is a different process than what fusion power experiments (or nuclear bombs) use, which would be even harder to replicate on earth. It generates gamma rays (which are downgraded to light by the time they get to us) but no or few neutrons.
The first step in solar fusion is the fusion of two protons to form a deuterium nucleus and a positron. It's believed that it takes an individual proton, on average and at the conditions in the sun's core, several million years before it successfully completes that reaction. That's why we probably can never replicate that process on earth.
It does seem as if fusion is an industry of process of engineering the “cart” that goes in front of the scientific “horse.”
To be clear, you are saying that the Sun is comprised largely of deuterium?
You state that the Sun’s fusion produces little, or no neutrons, and describe a process creating deuterium (hydrogen with a neutron) which you say is very slow, I believe. Does this mean that deuterium must already exist in the Sun for the fusion that we observe?
Thanks for your explanation!
Sounds like a good project for USAID.
Wait. Never mind.
I joke that solar electricity is “free” energy because it is energy that I have already paid for. ;-)
I find that it differs from electricity that I pay for monthly, in that I don’t mind using it. In fact, I look for ways to fully utilize it - charging lithium battery appliances, for instance.
Instead of electricity that you don’t want to use, you have electricity whose cost is MINIMIZED by consumption! It takes getting used to.
At this rate, my great grandchildren’s great grandchildren might see a semi-working prototype...
They’ve been just about to crack the fusion problem for 50 years. So tomorrow it will be solved?
Maybe their theory is flawed or completely wrong.
Fusion isn’t difficult. You just need massive amounts of gravity........................
Deuterium is produced from protons (hydrogen-1, "protium") in the first step of the fusion process in the sun's core. The deuterium nucleus is very reactive and only lasts a few minutes before it fuses with another proton to produce helium-3. Helium-3 is also very reactive and fuses with another helium-3 to produce helium-4 and two protons. In the conditions that currently exist in the sun's core, helium-4 is non-reactive.
The process to get from 2 protons to deuterium is very slow (on average), but there are a lot of protons in the sun's core, so it's happening all of the time. Still, the sun's power density (power produced per unit volume) is pretty low -- a cubic foot of the sun's core produces on the order of 100 watts of power. Of course, there's a lot of cubic feet in the sun's core.
Because deuterium is so reactive in stellar-core environments, there isn't a lot of it in the universe. "Not a lot in the universe" is still quite a bit. About 1% of the hydrogen on earth is deuterium.
Thank you for that very clear and detailed response! I appreciate the time you took to write it.
You’re welcome!
Two weeks.
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